Tag: South Korea

It is great to see that USFK has finally allowed soldiers to wear air masks:

U.S. Forces Korea has changed its policy to allow soldiers to wear black filtering masks while in uniform as protection against poor air quality in South Korea.
Army regulations had barred soldiers from wearing the masks, which cover noses and mouths, in uniform unless they had a certified medical condition that merited an exception. By contrast, the Air Force permitted masks when pollution hit a certain level.
The new policy, posted Monday, says all servicemembers may wear approved masks while outdoors in uniform when the air-quality index is reported as orange or higher, referring to a color scheme showing pollution levels.
The change comes as people in South Korea have endured record levels of fine dust that have smothered the country and prompted rising worries in the military community as soldiers spend a lot of time training and working outdoors.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

The Moon administration is further pushing the confederation idea with no hint of North Korea denuclearizing:

The South Korean government is planning to fund research projects into a range of potential models for unification with North Korea, documents seen by NK News showed this week, with case-studies including federation and EU-style confederation among several under consideration.
In plans for the two research projects, the South Korean Ministry of Unification (MOU) asked prospective participants in the project to examine cases of gradual unification.
Previous research on unification, it said, has concentrated on comparing Korea’s case to that of the “radical unification” of Germany in 1990, asking researchers to assume the North and South would likely take a more gradual approach.
Participants are also asked to look to the step-by-step process of unification suggested in the “Korean National Community Unification Formula” and pay attention to “implications that could be considered in the process of gradual change.”
The formula has long been the South Korean government’s formal plan for unification and is composed of three stages: reconciliation and cooperation, inter-Korean confederation, and unification.

NK News

You can read more at the link, but if these so called researchers try to copy the EU model, then their analysis is already a failure. There were no countries in the EU that were international pariahs threatening world peace by threatening their neighbors with conventional or nuclear attack. There was no countries in the EU launching terrorist attacks and a non-stop propaganda campaign into a neighboring country to undermine it either.

I can save the Moon administration all the money they are paying for this research by stating that any confederation that happens will occur on North Korean terms. That means a peace treaty that leads to the withdrawal of USFK, North Korea does not denuclearize, and South Korea carries the burden of rebuilding North Korea’s infrastructure, modernizing their military, and funding the Kim regime’s lavish lifestyle.

There will be no political or social openness in North Korea in return, instead the ideological indoctrination will be strengthened by the “victory” over the Americans by getting them to withdraw and the tribute the South Korean “puppets” are paying to Kim Jong-un in preparation for North Korea’s final victory.

Predictably the North Koreans have stormed out of the joint liaison office at Kaesong:

North Korean officials withdrew from the inter-Korean liaison office in the border city of Gaeseong on Friday. 

Seoul’s Unification Ministry said that North Korean officials held a meeting with their South Korean counterparts in the morning to announce the decision. 

The North Koreans are said to have cited what they called an order from the upper levels of leadership. 

The 15 or so North Korean officials left with only their documents, while leaving behind equipment, noting they didn’t care whether South Korea continues to maintain its office and that they would be in contact with the South to resolve working-level matters. 

KBS World Radio

You can read more at the link, but remember that this is the liaison office that the ROK government spent $8.5 million to renovate.

Here is the latest attempt by the Korean left to increase tensions with Japan and indoctrinate Korean children. Do not expect these attempts to increase tensions to stop anytime soon:

South Korea’s largest province is considering whether to stigmatize nearly 300 Japanese companies over their purported actions during World War II, by imposing an ordinance that requires schools to put alert labels on these firms’ products in their schools.

Twenty-seven members of the Gyeonggi Province council submitted the bill last week in an attempt to give students the “right understanding on history.” If passed, schools will have to place on the items stickers that say: “This product is made by a Japanese war criminal company.”
The move is likely further deepen a diplomatic spat between Seoul and Tokyo, which are at loggerheads over territorial issues and the legacy of Japan’s 35-year colonization of the Korean Peninsula (1910-1945).

The list of 299 companies includes Nikon, Panasonic and Yamaha. The rule would apply to items such as projectors, camcorders, cameras and copy machines with a price tag of 200,000 won ($190) or more. Most of the companies on the list do not commonly supply products to schools — they include Tokyo Gas, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Nikkei Asian Review

You can read more at the link, but maybe the Trump administration should offer a compromise to the Moon administration to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex only if a war crimes label is attached to every product that looks like those grotesque ads seen on cigarette boxes.

“The main issue is that there’s just no escaping them.”

Once I was reading mainstream Korean news outlets online at a law firm in the US and someone threatened to tell her superiors I was looking at porn sites. https://t.co/z9NPgGMGUc

— the oranckay (@oranckay) March 20, 2019

It looks like the South Korean media is trying to sensationalize an accidental collision during a figure skating competition into an anti-American incident:

A South Korean sports agency is claiming an American figure skater intentionally injured its client Lim Eun-soo with a skate blade in a collision during the ongoing world championships.
According to All That Sports, Lim sustained a cut to her calf Wednesday when Mariah Bell struck Lim’s leg with her skate during their warmup prior to the ladies’ short program at the International Skating Union (ISU) World Figure Skating Championships in Saitama, Japan.

Lim was immediately treated for her injury. She was 30th among 40 skaters to take the ice and had the cut on her leg taped before performing her program.
In her first senior world championships, Lim, 16, set a personal high with 72.91 points to rank fifth, while Bell, 22, scored 71.26 points to place sixth.
An All That Sports official who witnessed the collision said there was enough ground to believe Bell’s act was premeditated, since Lim was skating close to the walls so as not to interfere with others, and Bell came from behind the South Korean to make contact.

Yonhap

The only problem with the South Korean sports agency’s claim is that it is not true:

he agency that represents Lim, All That Sports, told Agence France-Press that Bell has been “bullying Lim for months,” and once the incident occurred, asked the South Korean federation to lodge a formal complaint with the International Skating Union, the worldwide federation for the sport. As one of Lim’s agents told Yonhap News, Bell was waiting her turn to rehearse her program when she “suddenly kicked and stabbed Lim’s calf with her skate blades.”

Sensational? Yes. True? No.
Bell was the one who was rehearsing her short program, not Lim, which means Bell had the right of way on the ice and it was Lim’s job to get out of her way. Videotape shot from the stands shows Bell skating backwards at a relatively rapid pace near the boards with Lim in her path. At that point, Bell would not have been able to see Lim — but Lim had the responsibility to see Bell and move out of the way.

This is protocol for every skater at every competition, where six skaters share the ice on practice sessions and warmups.
What’s more, because Lim trains with Bell, she certainly should know Bell’s short program after seeing it on training sessions for months. All skaters get to know what their training partners and competitors are doing, including where they are headed and where their jumps, spins and other moves are placed on the ice.

As Bell went by Lim, she started to turn to go forward, and apparently her skate blade slightly cut Lim’s leg. Both skaters were able to compete in the short program later in the day, and both did very well, with Lim finishing fifth with a personal-best score and Bell sixth. 
This is not the first time there has been a collision involving two skaters in a competition. In fact, it would be unusual for an event like the worlds or Olympics to go by without a practice collision. The same day as the Bell-Lim scrap, there was a much more spectacular crash: French pairs skater Vanessa James was skating backwards when she and Italy’s Matteo Guarise slammed into each other at full speed during the warmup before the pairs competition.

As conspiracy theories spread across the internet, the ISU put out a statement saying there was “no evidence” that Bell deliberately kicked Lim, and Arutunian told a Russian news agency the same thing, according to an internet translation.

USA Today

It appears to me that the Korean media may be trying to recreate another Apollo Anton Ohno like controversy that led to him being public enemy #1 and increased anti-Americanism in South Korea. However, this was not the Olympics and no gold medal was on the line thus I expect this will be quickly forgotten.

However, continue to expect every little incident that can remotely be twisted for anti-Americanism to be published hoping something will eventually stick.